Magento Reveals: 7 Ecommerce Tips to Boost Holiday Sales

By Annabel Paton

With over 240,000 merchants worldwide, Magento is one of today’s leading ecommerce platforms. With Christmas now just around the corner, the team at Magento have recently released 7 ecommerce tips to boost holiday sales. Let’s take a look…

Optimise for mobile.

Mobile ecommerce grew by 28 percent in 2014—more than twice the 13 percent growth rate of desktop ecommerce. With over 50 percent of all online shopping occurring on smartphones and tablets, you’re virtually guaranteed to lose customers if your website isn’t mobile-friendly by this holiday season. There’s still time to implement responsive design and to make your emails responsive.

Make sure pages load quickly.

During the busy holiday season, having slow-loading product pages is a sure-fire way to ensure users abandon your site. Forty percent of visitors will leave if they don’t load within three seconds, and 79 percent of your customers won’t return if they’re unhappy with your site’s load time. You can combat this by implementing traffic management and optimization tools to alert you of downtime and sluggish performance.

Make it personal.

Personalising your content and online experience to each individual user according to his or her history of interests, behaviors, and transactions can go a long way towards increasing sales this holiday season. You can put your user data to work by identifying your high-CLV (customer lifetime value) customers so you can segment your email list and send more personalised, targeted promotions.

Integrate social media.

Adding social sharing buttons to your product pages is an easy and effective way to get your products in front of your customers’ followers on social media. Making products shareable on sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ essentially turns your satisfied customers into salespeople that their social circles trust. Engage prospects and customers on social media and promote your special offers for the holiday season.

Simplify the checkout process.

The average online shopping cart abandonment rate is a whopping 69 percent—a rate you can avoid this holiday season by making the checkout process easy, intuitive, brief, and secure. You can do this by allowing for guest checkout (i.e., not requiring a user to create an account), showing a progress bar, only asking for essential personal information, accepting multiple payment options, auto-filling fields when possible, and reinforcing trust with security badges.

Offer free shipping.

Shipping was the #1 reason for shopping cart abandonment last holiday season. According to a recent Comscore study, free shipping continues to drive purchasing decisions on ecommerce sites. Nearly 60 percent of shoppers are willing to add more products to their cart to qualify for free shipping, over 80 percent are willing to wait an additional two days for delivery if shipping is free, and nearly 70 percent require free returns shipping to complete the purchase.

Focus on content marketing.

Many online retailers ignore the many benefits content marketing provides to attract more qualified prospects and convert more customers. Write and publish helpful tip lists, gift guides, and other content to position your website as a reputable resource for holiday shopping and industry expertise. In addition to building customer trust, regularly adding high-quality content to your site attracts Google’s attention so you can increase visibility as well.

Magento’s original post can be found here: https://magento.com/blog/best-practices/7-ecommerce-tips-boost-holiday-season-sales